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gaza health ministry
'There Is No Ceasefire' Say Gazans as Israeli Strikes Kill, Wound Hundreds
"The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives," said one young woman from Gaza.
Oct 31, 2025
More than 800 Palestinians have been killed or wounded since the October 10 truce between Israel and Hamas, leaving many residents of the still-embattled, still-starved strip to question whether there is actually any "ceasefire" at all.
“There is no ceasefire,” Hala, a 20-year-old woman who was awakened from her sleep Tuesday when an Israeli missile struck her neighbor's home, told The Intercept on Thursday. "The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”
Hala was looking forward to her upcoming wedding. But the Israeli attack killed her fiancé's cousin, his wife, and all but one of their children. The wedding has now been postponed.
The slain relatives were among the at least 104 Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes on Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed Tuesday's attacks targeted "dozens of key terrorists," however IDF officials provided details on just 26 suspected militants. The Gaza Health Ministry said 46 children and 20 women were among those killed by the Israeli strikes.
“There is no doubt this is an attack on civilians,” Dr. Morten Rostrup, a physician with Doctors Without Borders working at al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City, told The Intercept. “Do we really call this a ceasefire?”
The Gaza Health Ministry says at least 211 people have been killed and 597 others wounded since the truce went into effect on October 10.
Since the Gaza genocide began in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have killed at least 68,519 Palestinians and wounded over 170,300 others. Around 9,500 Palestinians remain missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble. Leaked classified IDF documents suggest that over 80% of slain Palestinians were civilians.
Gaza officials say Israeli forces have violated the ceasefire at least 125 times. Meanwhile, Israel has cited relatively minor violations of the truce by Hamas, which have resulted in only a handful of Israeli casualties, as justification for the resumption of strikes that have left hundreds dead and wounded.
Still, US President Donald Trump—whose administration played a key role in brokering the truce—insists that the ceasefire is holding.
“I think none of us should be surprised that Israel has continued breaking the ceasefire,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at New York-based Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, told The Intercept.
"It very much still fits into the Trump administration’s bigger picture, because as long as they can kind of say that there is a quote-unquote ‘ceasefire’ in effect, as long as they can say, ‘At least it’s better than before,’ that enables the US and the rest of the international community to let up on the pressure on Israel and to return to business as usual," added Kenney-Shawa, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza.
Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said, "For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire."
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'We Took the Gloves Off': Former Israeli Military Chief Admits 220,000 Gaza Casualties
"Looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case," said one observer.
Sep 12, 2025
Belying persistent efforts by Israel and its defenders to deny the staggering number of Palestinians killed during the 23-month Gaza genocide, the general who led the Israel Defense Forces during most of the war acknowledged this week that around 220,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who stepped down in March after leading the IDF since January 2023—told residents of Ein Habor in southern Israel earlier this week that "over 10%" of Gaza's population of approximately 2.2 million "were killed or injured" since October 2023.
"This is not a gentle war, we took the gloves off from the first minute" Halevi said, adding that "not once" has any legal authority "limited" his wartime conduct.
Following the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.
The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.
Halevi insisted that "we are doing everything in accordance with international law."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague disagrees, having issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation and murder. Israel's conduct in the war is also the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case filed by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations.
Halevi's admission tracks with official Gaza Health Ministry figures showing at least 228,815 people killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza. GHM also says that around 9,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported.
The remarks by Halevi come less than a month after a joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, as of May, 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the war were civilians. The report, which drew from classified IDF intelligence data, blew the lid off of Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio.
Responding to Halevi's admission, Drop Site News national security and foreign affairs reporter Murtaza Hussain said on social media that he is "looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case."
Israeli officials and media, along with their supportive US counterparts during both the Biden and Trump administrations, have generally cast doubt or outright denied GHM figures—which have been found to be reliable by the IDF, US officials, and researchers—by linking them to Hamas. This comes in addition to widespread Israeli and US denials of Israel's forced famine and starvation deaths and IDF war crimes in Gaza.
However, there have been rare instances of frankness, including when Barbara Leaf, a senior State Department official during the Biden administration, said that Gaza casualties could be "even higher than are being cited." Biden-era State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller also admitted that the Gaza death toll "could very well be more" than GHM reported, even as he lied to the public about who was thwarting ceasefire efforts.
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Israel Massacres Gaza Children Fetching Water, Starves 13 More Palestinians to Death
"A child in Gaza shouldn't have to die for a sip of water," said one Palestinian American critic. "Families are starving, fleeing under bombs, with nowhere safe to go. Humanity is failing them."
Sep 02, 2025
Israeli occupation forces killed scores more Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, including 13 people who starved to death and at least 11 others—including seven children—massacred while collecting water in a so-called "safe zone."
The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) said that at least 89 Gazans were killed in Israeli attacks throughout the embattled strip since dawn Tuesday, including 42 in Gaza City, where Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops are pushing ahead with Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian exclave.
At least 11 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed in an IDF airstrike as they gathered water in al-Mawasi, an area where Israeli authorities encouraged people to flee ahead of the invasion of northern Gaza.
Earlier on Tuesday, the IDF's spokesperson for Arab media issued an advisory stating, "To all residents of the Gaza Strip, in preparation for the expansion of fighting into Gaza City, we remind you that the al-Mawasi area will witness the provision of better humanitarian services, particularly those related to healthcare, water, and food."
Responding to the massacre, Palestinian American journalist Alexandra Halaby wrote on X: "A child in Gaza shouldn't have to die for a sip of water. Families are starving, fleeing under bombs, with nowhere safe to go. Humanity is failing them. Demand a ceasefire. Demand aid. Demand justice."
Assal Rad, a media critic and scholar of Middle East history, posted a graphic photo of some of the slain children on X, quipping, "More Israeli 'self-defense' today in Gaza."
Also on Tuesday, GHM said it registered 13 deaths, including three children, due to starvation and malnutrition over the past 24 hours. That brings the total number of deaths from the Gaza famine caused by Israel to at least 361—130 of them children.
All told, Israel's 697-day annihilation and siege of Gaza have killed at least 63,633 Palestinians—most of them women and children—while wounding more than 160,900 others and leaving thousands more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Experts say the actual number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces is likely far higher than the official GHM figures.
Israel's conduct in the war and Israeli leaders' statements of intent to destroy Gaza and its people are the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case. On Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) joined the growing number of groups and individuals calling Israel's war on Gaza a genocide.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are also fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants accusing the pair of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Two more Palestinian journalists were also killed by Israel forces on Tuesday. Eman Al-Zamli was reportedly killed by IDF drone fire while fetching drinking water near the Hamad City neighborhood, north of Khan Younis. Rasmi Salem of the Manara Media Company was killed in an IDF strike on Abu al-Amin Street near al-Jalaa Square in Gaza City.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), United Nations experts, and Gaza officials, between 210 and 275 Palestinian media workers have been killed by IDF bombs and bullets since October 2023.
On Sunday, dozens of Lebanese journalists and others rallied in Beirut's Martyrs' Square for a sit-in protest to express solidarity with Palestinian colleagues killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
"Journalists are being killed in Gaza because they show the world what they see with their own eyes," Walid Kilani, Hamas' media official in Lebanon, told the demonstrators, according to L'Orient Today.
The Beirut rally followed a Saturday silent protest march for slain Palestinian journalists held in the Swedish cities of Stockholm and Göteborg, and an open call by more than 200 advocacy groups, media outlets, and journalists for Israel to let foreign reporters into Gaza.
"At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed," said RSF.
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